Re: Bremer gives Baghdad to Business

[Barkley Rosser <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

     Bremer may be out to make lots of money.
But his de-Ba'athification is an act of hysteria
and incompetence.  These guys do not know
what they have gotten into and are caught by
their own rhetoric and are panicking.  It would
obviously be much easier to get Iraq functional
again if one allowed many former officials to
continue in their jobs.  Many would probably
love to become ass-kissing backers of a
flunky pro-US regime.
     Heck, the US's biggest ally on the European
continent in this war, now the president of Poland,
was a high official in a former Communist government.
For that matter, the US is now closely allied with
both Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, both run by former
members of the old Soviet politburo.
Barkley Rosser
----- Original Message -----
From: "k hanly" <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 3:23 PM
Subject: [PEN-L] Bremer gives Baghdad to Business


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> http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,970595,00.html
>
> Comment
>
> Bush's can-do man puts the business into Baghdad
>
> Paul Bremer's 'de-Ba'athification' is just downsizing
> in disguise
>
> Naomi Klein
>
> Thursday June 5, 2003
> The Guardian (London)
>
> The streets of Baghdad are a swamp of uncollected
> garbage and crime. Battered local businesses are going
> bankrupt, unable to compete with cheap imports.
> Unemployment is soaring and thousands of laid-off
> state workers are protesting in the streets.
> In other words, Iraq looks like every other country
> that has undergone rapid-fire "structural adjustments"
> prescribed by Washington, from Russia's infamous
> "shock therapy" in the early 90s to Argentina's
> disastrous "surgery without anasthetic". Except that
> Iraq's so-called reconstruction makes those wrenching
> reforms look like spa treatments.
>
> Paul Bremer, the US-appointed governor of Iraq, has
> already proved something of a flop in the democracy
> department in his three weeks there, nixing plans for
> Iraqis to select their own interim government in
> favour of his own handpicked team of advisers. But
> Bremer has proved to have something of a gift when it
> comes to rolling out the red carpet for US
> multinationals. Expect broad smiles when George Bush
> meets Bremer in Qatar today.
>
> For two weeks, Bremer has been hacking away at Iraq's
> public sector like former Sunbeam executive "Chainsaw"
> Al Dunlap in a flak jacket. On May 12, Bremer banned
> up to 30,000 senior Ba'ath party officials from jobs
> in government. Less than a week later, he dissolved
> the army and the information ministry, putting 400,000
> Iraqis out of work without pensions or re-employment
> programmes.
>
> Of course, if Saddam Hussein's henchmen and
> propagandists held on to power in Iraq it would be a
> human rights disaster. "De-Ba'athification", as the
> purging of party officials has come to be called, may
> be the only way to prevent a comeback by Saddam's crew
> - and hold on to the one true benefit that could come
> from George Bush's illegal war.
>
> But Bremer has gone far beyond purging powerful Ba'ath
> loyalists and moved into a full-scale assault on the
> state itself. It seems doctors who joined the party as
> children and have no love for Saddam face dismissal,
> while low-level civil servants with no ties to the
> party have been fired en masse. Nuha Najeeb, who ran a
> Baghdad printing house, told Reuters: "I ... had
> nothing to do with Saddam's media, so why am I
> sacked?"
>
> As the Bush administration becomes increasingly open
> about its plans to privatise Iraq's state industries
> and parts of government, Bremer's de-Ba'athification
> takes on new meaning. Is he working only get rid of
> Ba'ath party members, or is he also working to shrink
> the public sector as a whole so that hospitals,
> schools and even the army are primed for privatisation
> by US firms? Just as reconstruction is the guise for
> privatisation, de-Ba'athification looks a lot like
> disguised downsizing.
>
> Similar questions arise from Bremer's chainsaw job on
> Iraqi companies, already pummelled by 12 years of
> sanctions and a month and a half of looting. Bremer
> did not even wait to get lights back on in Baghdad,
> for the dinar to stabilise or for the spare parts to
> arrive for Iraq's hobbled factories before he
> declared, on May 26, that Iraq was "open for
> business".
>
> Duty-free imported television sets and packaged food
> flooded across the border, pushing many Iraqi
> businesses into bankruptcy, unable to compete. This is
> how Iraq joined the global "free market" economy: in
> the dark.
>
> Paul Bremer is, according to Bush, "a can-do type of
> person". Indeed he is. In less than a month he has
> readied large swathes of state activity for corporate
> takeover, primed the Iraqi market for foreign
> importers to make a killing by doing away with much of
> the local competition, and made sure there won't be
> any unpleasant Iraqi government interference - in
> fact, he has made sure there will be no Iraqi
> government at all during this crucial period when so
> many key decisions will be made. Bremer is Iraq's
> one-man International Monetary Fund.
>
> Like so many of the men who populate the Bush foreign
> policy landscape, Bremer sees war as a business
> opportunity. On October 11 2001, just one month after
> the terror attacks in New York and Washington, Bremer,
> once Ronald Reagan's ambassador at large for
> counterterrorism, launched a company designed to
> capitalise on the new atmosphere of fear in US
> corporate boardrooms. Crisis Consulting Practice, a
> division of the insurance giant Marsh and McLennan,
> specialises in helping multinationals to come up with
> "integrated and comprehensive crisis solutions" for
> everything from terror attacks to accounting fraud.
> And, thanks to a strategic alliance with Versar, a
> specialist in biological and chemical threats, clients
> of the two companies are treated to "total
> counter-terrorism services".
>
> In order to sell this kind of high-priced protection
> to US firms, Bremer had to make the sort of frank
> links between terrorism and the failing global economy
> that activists are consistently called lunatics for
> articulating. In a November 2001 policy paper, titled
> New Risks in International Business, he explains that
> free trade policies "require laying off workers. And
> opening markets to foreign trade puts enormous
> pressure on traditional retailers and trade
> monopolies". This leads to "growing income gaps and
> social tensions", which in turn can lead to a range of
> attacks on US firms, from terrorism to government
> attempts to reverse privatisation and trade
> incentives.
>
> He could be describing the backlash his own policies
> are provoking in Iraq. But then guys like Bremer
> always know how to play both sides. Like a hacker who
> cripples corporate websites then sells himself as a
> network security specialist, in a few months Bremer
> may well be selling terrorism insurance to the very
> companies he welcomed into Iraq.
>
> And why not? As Bremer told his clients back at Marsh,
> globalisation may have immediate negative consequences
> for many but it also leads to "the creation of
> unprecedented wealth".
>
> It has for Bremer and his cronies. On May 12, the day
> he arrived in Iraq, his former boss, Marsh chairman
> Jeffrey W Greenberg, announced that 2002 "was a great
> year for Marsh - operating income was up 31%, Marsh's
> expertise analysing risk and helping clients develop
> risk management programmes has been in great demand.
> Our prospects have never been better".
>
> Many point out that Paul Bremer is no expert on Iraqi
> politics. But that was never the point. He seems to be
> an expert at profiting from the war on terror, and at
> helping US multinationals make money in far off places
> where they are both unpopular and unwelcome. In other
> words, he is perfect for the job.
>
>
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